The Vatican Library has allowed some of the exhibits on renaisance culture to be photographed and distributed on the web. The person who produced the hypertext version of the exhibition has chosen to represent it in terms of a physical museum. We can start in the main hall , for example, wander into the Music hall , and tour the rooms . Along the way, we are introduced to some of the background of Roman culture of the 16th century. Rich sources of information such as this are appearing on the more and more frequently.
A good example of the added value a good W3 server can give to data is to be found in the Unix Manual server at Ohio state. Suppose we are looking for a routine to read the time on a Sun machine, which will also be available in other vesrions of unix. From the list of unix manuals, we select the Sun manuals . We select search by keyword , then type in the word "time", and get a list of sun manual pages referring to time. We select one, about "time.1v" . Looking at this page, we note that the regular unix manual page has been enhanced with some links. At the top, there are links to man pages with the same name in different sections, and also to the equivalent man page on different operating systems. These links have all been added quite automatically by the server as it handed us the document. This is a good example of hypertext value being added for free. Note also that the reference to csh(1) in the description was also automatically linked to the appropriate man page.
If you want to see some fancy demos, then the Mosaic demo document at NCSA is a good source.
(Part of the w3 talk . On to finding our way )
Tim BL